BW Media Spotlight

I would be remiss in my role as chronicler if I didn’t bring up a counterpoint to a previous perspective on why this first pitch, and presumably the one after it, is so far removed from the show we already had with the miniseries and continued to have with the show we finally got. In the comments of part one the owner of the Sunbow/Marvel Archive wrote in to challenge Chris McFeely’s take (which he quoted from Marvel Comics’ Jim Shooter) on why Sunbow and Marvel Productions went with such a radical change. It was his statement (or her–this is the internet and I wasn’t given a name so I’m covering my rear) that Marvel Productions “simply did not have the legal right to look at development work Marvel Comics created for their client Griffin-Bacal, until Griffin-Bacal contracted them to create this network pitch”. So what Jeffrey Scott was doing was doing the best he could with what he got.

I’m not so convinced, mostly because that would have been a really dumb decision on someone’s part. You’d think you’d want your client to see the story they approved for the toys used in the pitch to the network. That same backstory was on the packaging and promotional material already out in stores, plus Sunbow and Marvel already worked on the miniseries, so unless the timeline is really weird they should already know what happened in the first miniseries. This could explain why the second pitch is closer to what the toys were doing, and one change we’ll start seeing here was CBS’s fault, but whose to say Shooter had all the information when he made the quoted comment? I wasn’t there, but I have to at least acknowledge this new data in the name of fairness. In the end you’ll have to decide. We’re here to talk about Deceptions.

Speaking of part one, the backstory tells us that the Decepticons are now all dead, possessing machines on Earth like Starscream did in season 3. I’m not going to compare it to his mutant spark, an idea that started with Beast Wars while season 3 just called it his ghost (his namesake in the early episodes of Transformers Energon also got to be a ghost), and I made my comparison last time to other uses of the idea. The Decepticons would have been the “villain of the week”, which I guess would be their way to get the other toys in despite the Decepticons at the time being fewer in number than the Autobots even without packaging goofs like the red Bumblebee or the car that was neither Bumblebee nor Cliffjumper. (Fans named him “Bumblejumper” for years until Dreamwave officially named him the shortened name “Bumper”, which is a better name in my opinion and now I want one because he was a fun character in that comic.) That’s not the only thing different about the Decepticons in this story. Remember than cannon that was stolen from the Russians in the backstory?

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